DEVOPS WEEKLY ISSUE #172 - 20th April 2014

Lots of content from this ChefConf this week, along with a nice run of posts about why having developers focus on customers is probably a good idea, even if it takes us away from just writing code all the time. If any readers are going to be at Craft in Budapest this week do say hello while I’m there.

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ChefConf

A presentation from ChefConf last week all about Berkshelf, and in particular about why strongly opinionated workflow software is probably a good thing.
http://www.slideshare.net/resetexistence/chef-conf2014

Another presentation, this one focusing on general tips for testing dynamic systems. Presents 7 stages of testing from high level integration testing to unit testing configuration management code and resource starvation.
https://speakerdeck.com/ranjibd/how-to-mock-a-mocking-bird-testing-dynamic-infrastructure

I’m a huge fan of Test Kitchen, especially with the new provisioners making it useful whatever tools you’re using. This presentation is both a good introduction and a look at new and upcoming features.
https://speakerdeck.com/fnichol/chefconf-2014-test-kitchen-one-year-later-and-the-future

One more ChefConf presentation. This one shows how to extend the Chef code to add useful features that are likely specific to your infrastructure. Exception handling, publish/subscribe systems and ohai plugins are all covered.
http://www.slideshare.net/jonlives/chefconf-2014

News

An interesting post rather cheekily entitled How ‘DevOps’ is Killing the Developer. It’s an interesting point but feel it misses the point. A bunch of the comments do a good job of explaining the misunderstanding
http://jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/04/15/how-devops-is-killing-the-developer/

The above post triggered a couple of worthwhile responses. This next post claims the opposite, a shift to thinking about operations is a move towards thinking about customers rather than just thinking about code - which should be a good thing in nearly every case.
http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/4/17/the-developer-is-dead.html

Not exactly a direct follow up to the above post, but it highlights the issue that devops really isn’t all about startups as some people appear to think. Great advice for anyone looking to change a large organisation from the inside.
http://major.io/2014/04/17/devops-and-enterprise-inertia/

A presentation all about Conway’s Law and continuous delivery. If you’re only aware of Conway’s Law in passing this is a good introduction, and mapping it to the organisational change required for continuous delivery to work is a nice idea.
http://www.slideshare.net/allankellynet/conways-law-continuous-delivery

More and more of the technical challenges larger organisations are facing are routed in distributed systems, so it’s worthwhile being familiar with the background, terminology and past work. This online book aims to be an approachable introduction to the subject.
http://book.mixu.net/distsys/

Jobs

Monetate is hiring a Sr Site Reliability Engineer and a Sr Software Engineer - Development Tools to join the team. At Monetate, we write software that helps marketers identify and delight individual customers at scale. We drive tens of billions of experiences each month crafted to treat each person as an individual. We’ve built a great foundation, and we’re only getting started.
http://monetate.com/jobs/open-positions/

Events

The first Cardiff Devops meetup is to be held on wednesday May 7th from 6:30 PM at FounderHub. A chance to talk Continuous Delivery, Infrastructure Automation and Business Culture Change. More small local meetups are cropping up it seems.
http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Cardiff/events/177283472/

Tools

Microsoft continue a good run of form by shipping a Vagrant provider for Azure. This could be the simplest way of testing on Windows from a non-Windows host.
https://github.com/MSOpenTech/vagrant-azure

The Chef Development Kit was announced at ChefConf and provides a nice opinionated development environment for Chef. This should lower the barrier to entry, especially for those new to Chef and especially to Ruby.
http://www.getchef.com/blog/2014/04/15/chef-development-kit/

An interesting project announced at the recent RedHat Summit, Atomic is a stripped down Linux distribution designed to provide a solid base for running Linux containers on top of. Lots of interest at the moment in different models for the operating system.
http://www.projectatomic.io/

An interesting looking command line tool for managing virtual machines from different providers. Currently only supports DigitalOcean but Linode and EC2 are on the way.
https://github.com/andrewchilds/overcast